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I really, really ought to be working right now. Oh, dear. But I got interview questions from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
foreverdirt, and it was much more fun answering those:
1) Do you have a favourite judicial ruling? If so, what is it and why?
At this point I feel obliged to talk about Miller v Jackson. I feel at this point that everyone ought to talk about Miller v Jackson.
Okay, for Americans and other aliens and people who just don't spend as much time on these things as I do - why, I don't know - about the most influential British judge of the twentieth century was Master of the Rolls and Court of Appeal judge Lord Denning. He was influential for his variety of interesting judgements and the whole areas of law he attempted (sometimes successfully) to create single-handedly. But possibly the reason why he was as well-beloved as he was because he wrote like this:
[From Miller v Jackson [1977] QB 966]
"In summertime village cricket is the delight of everyone. Nearly every village has its own cricket field where the young men play and the old men watch. In the village of Lintz in County Durham they have their own ground, where they have played these last 70 years. They tend it well. The wicket area is well rolled and mown. The outfield is kept short. It has a good club house for the players and seats for the onlookers. The village team play there on Saturdays and Sundays. They belong to a league, competing with the neighbouring villages. On other evenings after work they practise while the light lasts. Yet now after these 70 years a judge of the High Court has ordered that they must not play there any more. He has issued an injunction to stop them. He has done it at the instance of a newcomer who is no lover of cricket.
I defy anyone to deny the loveliness of that. Mmm. I have cases I like a lot - Turberville v Savage, for being so old and so punchy, Miller, for the chutzpah of the defendant, Pinnel's Case, for being a case that is still cited despite having been decided in 1602, etc. - but as actual rulings go, I refer to cliché above.
2) Who's your favourite philosopher, and why?
Hmmm. I have written here before about my general dislike of textual fetishisation when it comes to philosophy. Obviously it happens a lot with philosophers who were a) very influential and b) wrote a lot - subsequent thinkers try to draw out the threads of their thinking across their works, make extensive studies of individual works and place them in their wider diachronic and synchronic contexts, and to a certain extent I understand why they do it; it brings a deeper meaning to our readings of those philosophers' works to know how and when and alongside what they were written, that makes sense.
But beyond that I wonder why it's done to the extent it is, the immense focus on individual words in individual phrases, I wonder how this contributes to the greater whole of philosophy's projects - I mean, we can spend a lot of time on what Marx meant by alienation and what Kant meant by the will, and as above I understand why, but after a while, what are we contributing to theories of political economy and metaethics more generally? I have a generalised horror of philosophy approaching literary criticism; I can understand its working the other way, literary criticism that aims to find philosophical undercurrents in literature, but philosophy isn't supposed to be that sort of exercise.
So in general, I avoid saying I have a favourite philosopher: I have favourite areas of philosophy (language, mind, logic) and favourite contributions to them. But I might finish this incredibly long answer by saying I am very fond of Socrates (the "gadfly" model of philosophy, I endorse it), and Wittgenstein's theories of representation always strike me with how neat and elegantly argued they are.
3) What's your favourite guilty pleasure TV?
Friends. Shut up. I love it, I've seen every episode. Also Frasier, but I'm not so guilty about that one; I do genuinely think it's one of the best television programmes ever written.
(Look, you never know when you might need an encyclopaedic knowledge of nineties sitcoms. And when you do, you know where I am.)
4) Which author has most influenced your writing?
I actually don't know. Well, I've always been writing something or other, since I was maybe eleven or twelve, and this sounds terrible, but when I grew to the point where I was tracking influences on my own writing and thinking how best to write rather than doing it by instinct, I'd already fallen into fandom. It was fandom that taught me to teach myself to write, and individual people I met in fandom who did that specifically: the one person who has the most influence on my writing isgamesiplay, who has been talking to me about writing, showing me her writing, critiquing my writing, for nearly eight years, and I don't think you can discount an association like that.
So, er. One author, though, whose style I would like to emulate is Ursula Le Guin. She has a way of using a minimal set of words, but the right ones, which is exactly how I would like to write.
5) Not so much a question as a request, but I really like this idea, so: my housemate has just been reading me six word stories -- write one?
Program "reality" not responding: force quit?
If you would like questions, please comment and say so. eta: and that's a wrap, folks. I don't think I can come up with any more questions!
foreverdirt, and it was much more fun answering those:1) Do you have a favourite judicial ruling? If so, what is it and why?
At this point I feel obliged to talk about Miller v Jackson. I feel at this point that everyone ought to talk about Miller v Jackson.
Okay, for Americans and other aliens and people who just don't spend as much time on these things as I do - why, I don't know - about the most influential British judge of the twentieth century was Master of the Rolls and Court of Appeal judge Lord Denning. He was influential for his variety of interesting judgements and the whole areas of law he attempted (sometimes successfully) to create single-handedly. But possibly the reason why he was as well-beloved as he was because he wrote like this:
[From Miller v Jackson [1977] QB 966]
"In summertime village cricket is the delight of everyone. Nearly every village has its own cricket field where the young men play and the old men watch. In the village of Lintz in County Durham they have their own ground, where they have played these last 70 years. They tend it well. The wicket area is well rolled and mown. The outfield is kept short. It has a good club house for the players and seats for the onlookers. The village team play there on Saturdays and Sundays. They belong to a league, competing with the neighbouring villages. On other evenings after work they practise while the light lasts. Yet now after these 70 years a judge of the High Court has ordered that they must not play there any more. He has issued an injunction to stop them. He has done it at the instance of a newcomer who is no lover of cricket.
I defy anyone to deny the loveliness of that. Mmm. I have cases I like a lot - Turberville v Savage, for being so old and so punchy, Miller, for the chutzpah of the defendant, Pinnel's Case, for being a case that is still cited despite having been decided in 1602, etc. - but as actual rulings go, I refer to cliché above.
2) Who's your favourite philosopher, and why?
Hmmm. I have written here before about my general dislike of textual fetishisation when it comes to philosophy. Obviously it happens a lot with philosophers who were a) very influential and b) wrote a lot - subsequent thinkers try to draw out the threads of their thinking across their works, make extensive studies of individual works and place them in their wider diachronic and synchronic contexts, and to a certain extent I understand why they do it; it brings a deeper meaning to our readings of those philosophers' works to know how and when and alongside what they were written, that makes sense.
But beyond that I wonder why it's done to the extent it is, the immense focus on individual words in individual phrases, I wonder how this contributes to the greater whole of philosophy's projects - I mean, we can spend a lot of time on what Marx meant by alienation and what Kant meant by the will, and as above I understand why, but after a while, what are we contributing to theories of political economy and metaethics more generally? I have a generalised horror of philosophy approaching literary criticism; I can understand its working the other way, literary criticism that aims to find philosophical undercurrents in literature, but philosophy isn't supposed to be that sort of exercise.
So in general, I avoid saying I have a favourite philosopher: I have favourite areas of philosophy (language, mind, logic) and favourite contributions to them. But I might finish this incredibly long answer by saying I am very fond of Socrates (the "gadfly" model of philosophy, I endorse it), and Wittgenstein's theories of representation always strike me with how neat and elegantly argued they are.
3) What's your favourite guilty pleasure TV?
Friends. Shut up. I love it, I've seen every episode. Also Frasier, but I'm not so guilty about that one; I do genuinely think it's one of the best television programmes ever written.
(Look, you never know when you might need an encyclopaedic knowledge of nineties sitcoms. And when you do, you know where I am.)
4) Which author has most influenced your writing?
I actually don't know. Well, I've always been writing something or other, since I was maybe eleven or twelve, and this sounds terrible, but when I grew to the point where I was tracking influences on my own writing and thinking how best to write rather than doing it by instinct, I'd already fallen into fandom. It was fandom that taught me to teach myself to write, and individual people I met in fandom who did that specifically: the one person who has the most influence on my writing is
gamesiplay, who has been talking to me about writing, showing me her writing, critiquing my writing, for nearly eight years, and I don't think you can discount an association like that.So, er. One author, though, whose style I would like to emulate is Ursula Le Guin. She has a way of using a minimal set of words, but the right ones, which is exactly how I would like to write.
5) Not so much a question as a request, but I really like this idea, so: my housemate has just been reading me six word stories -- write one?
Program "reality" not responding: force quit?
If you would like questions, please comment and say so. eta: and that's a wrap, folks. I don't think I can come up with any more questions!